Boom Movement Swimmer

Clean, crisp audio at moderate to high volumes. Can be fastened onto most surfaces with the use of the flexible tail or suction cup accessory. Lightweight and easily portable. Sperm-like design is a definite conversation starter.

Cons
Distorts on tracks with deep bass at top volumes.

Bottom Line

The Boom Movement Swimmer sounds like a budget Bluetooth speaker, but its useful, waterproof design makes it a reliable portable option.

Sub-$100 portable Bluetooth speakers rarely deliver excellent audio, and often they're light on extra features. The Boom Movement Swimmer is not a sonic heavy-hitter, either, but for $59.99 (direct), it delivers enough clean audio at moderate volumes to at least meet reasonable expectations. In terms of its design, however, the Swimmer is a winner—it's very waterproof, and has a unique tail-like, flexible extension that can be wrap around all sorts of objects, so you can hang the speaker in a convenient spot. A suction cup replaces the tail for instances when it's a better fit for securing the speaker. So, while the audio is decent and sounds every bit like a $60 speaker, the design makes the Swimmer an ultra-portable, versatile, useful audio option.

DesignEvery shade the Swimmer is offered in is on the lighter, pastel side of the color spectrum, from a mint green to blue, white, red, or green. The speaker grille for each is a different color than the 2.5 by 2.6-inch body (height by diameter at widest point). Our test unit was white with a blue grille, and the rubberized surface can get dirty fairly easily.

Admittedly, the images you can see here of the Swimmer may look a little, well, boring. This speaker sort of resembles a shower head. Yet, in person, the design makes much more sense—the bendable, very flexible 6.2-inch tail can latch the speaker on to a variety of objects (it fastens, sort of like a watch band) and holds the shape you give it quite well. The push button controls along the rubbery surface of the Swimmer are for Power, Volume Up/Down, Play/Pause, and Bluetooth pairing.

As the name implies, however, the most impressive aspect of the Swimmer is its water resistance. It's IPX7-rated, which means you can dunk this thing in a tub of water for 30 minutes or so, with no ill effects—though you need to keep the tail on. Yes, the tail is removable, so that you can also use an included suction cup accessory to fasten the Swimmer to a surface if there's nothing to wrap the tail around. But removing the tail makes the speaker more vulnerable to water damage.

Included with the Swimmer, along with the suction cup, are a USB charging cable and a 3.5mm aux input cable. Boom Movement rates the battery life at roughly eight hours at top volumes or 16 hours at half volume—and it takes roughly two hours for the internal Lithium Ion battery to fully charge.

PerformanceUnsurprisingly, the Swimmer doesn't get super-loud—this is a small device—nor does it handle deep bass well at top volumes. The Knife's "Silent Shout," which has plenty of challenging sub-bass content, distorts at top volumes on both the speaker and the sound source (in this case, an iPhone 5s). At more moderate volumes, the distortion disappears, and the Swimmer at least conveys a sense of the deep bass in the track, but obviously, this is not a speaker with intense low end. At this price, it's pretty unreasonable to expect excellent audio.

That said, on less bass-heavy tracks, like Bill Callahan's "Drover," his vocals are clean and clear, with a wonderful treble edge to them that nicely compliments the baritone low-mids of his delivery. The drums on this track that often get a bass boost on larger speakers and then do battle with his vocals are not much of a factor at all here. Basically, if you're looking for serious or even decent bass response, you need to spend more money on a larger speaker. That said, the Swimmer occasionally surprises in this realm—Jay-Z and Kanye West's "No Church in the Wild" gets not only the crisp high-mid presence we expect, so than the kick drum loop has a good amount of crunch to it, but there's also some unexpected low-end thump to the loop. No bass fiend will mistake this for a bass-heavy speaker, but the Swimmer can occasionally summon sounds beyond its modest frame and price.

Obviously, however, the selling point of the Swimmer is the portability, versatility (in terms of placement on surfaces), and durability in wet environments. If you're looking for a better-looking small Bluetooth speaker in this price range and don't need the other features, consider the Bem Wireless Mobile Speaker. The 808 Audio Canz Wireless Speaker, meanwhile, is the cheapest speaker we can currently recommend in this price range. If you have more room in your budget, the Panasonic SC-NT10 is also fairly durable and delivers a more powerful, distortion free experience. At a much higher price, the Editors' Choice Bose SoundLink Mini is reasonably durable and packs a nice sonic experience, though it's not waterproof and bit bigger than these other options. For $60, however, it's hard not to like the peculiar little Swimmer, that can be at home poolside or in the bathroom, in the rain and on camping trips.

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